On World Humanitarian Day – 19 August – Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH) and the History Meeting House are inviting participants to the opening of the open-air exhibition ‘My Home. Civilians in the Face of War: Poland, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon”. The exhibition can be visited at the Rev. Jan Twardowski square in Warsaw.
The exhibition will juxtapose archival photographs from Poland in and just after World War II with contemporary images of war from Iraq, Lebanon, Ukraine and Syria from 2019 – 2022. The author of the images is photographer Agata Grzybowska, who collaborates with PAH. The historic photographs come from the collections of the Central Photographic Agency (now PAP Foto) and the archives of US war correspondents Julien Bryan and John Vachon.
The exhibition consists of 23 photographs of the everyday life of the inhabitants in unusual circumstances, during wartime. The contemporary photos are separated from the archive photos by more than 80 years. What they have in common is the view of the photographers focused on the people and their attempts to live in the country in spite of the war or in the refugee camps – running a household, raising children who play in the yards, playing football and look after their younger siblings.
War and the fear, terror and death that accompany it are out of frame in the exhibition. However, anticipation, a state of enforced temporariness, powerlessness and helplessness have been captured in the photographs.
“The atrocities of war keep recurring and we cannot remain indifferent to them. With this exhibition, we want to tell the story of the blameless pain that wars have continuously caused since the dawn of history, regardless of where they are carried out. It is also our disagreement with the poeticisation or normalisation of war. In our selection, images from Warsaw in 1939 and Kharkiv in 2022 meet. The destinies of the people depicted in these photographs are intertwined in a very poignant way”, says Alicja Ryś of PAH, co-curator of the exhibition.
Arkadiusz Słomczyński